Old Fashioned

  “Thank you. Clay Walsh.”

  “Bert Bellman.” He gestured to the rocker. “You did a fine job. Wonderful finish, perfect color. Those slats look just right.”

  “She seemed like she was worth all the hard work.”

  “My older brother, Raymond, died last year. This is the only . . .” Bert cleared his throat. “Anyways, a couple years before I was born, my dad worked in the fields of West Virginia. Oil. Just outside Morgantown. They lived in a tent.”

  Clay leaned against the counter, eager to hear the story. It was one of the great delights of doing what he did—knowing the stories behind the treasures.

  “Ma and Dad, my brother. In a tent. Most of the families around there did that back then—just the way it was. When Raymond was three, there was a fire. Ma’s pregnant with me, and Dad was in the field. It spread so fast . . . Well, the only thing my mother had time to grab besides my brother was this chair. That’s it.”

  “Wow. What a great story,” Clay said. “I sensed this little chair was special.”

  “Possessions don’t mean much outside of who they belong to and what they meant to that person. This here rocking chair always stood in our family as a representation of what we were capable of overcoming.”

  Clay nodded, wondered what that item would be in his life.

  “You and your wife—you’ll grow old, the kids will be gone, and you’ll be able to look at every single thing in your house and have a memory attached to it.”

  “Oh . . . yeah, I’m not married.” Clay looked at the rocker. “But I love hearing the stories behind these pieces I restore. I love the idea of legacy.”

  “The idea, huh?” Bert chuckled. “Well, if you’re going to leave a legacy, you can’t be merely an observer, son. You gotta get a little beat up, like this old rocker.”

  Clay shook his hand. “I will keep that in mind.”

  Bert left, carrying the rocker like it was a newborn. Clay stood there for another moment, sensing how alone he was, how quiet the shop had become. He’d left one legacy already. Maybe the world didn’t need another one left by Clay Walsh.

  He decided to go get the mail outside. Maybe he just needed some sunlight.

  But the man’s words followed him right out the door. The truth was, Clay cherished the idea of legacy. He wanted to leave behind ideas and values that would outlive him. There was comfort in the continuity of life. But there was risk in trying to find a way to preserve it. His best bet was to stay out of the fire.

  Back in his workroom, he sorted through the bills, then stopped at the handwritten envelope with his name in fancy, shaky cursive. He ripped it open. Inside was a single tea bag.

  He put the tea bag back in the envelope and clutched it. This. Her! It was exactly what he needed. At the exact right time, as usual.

  “This is the day the Lord has made.”

  “I will rejoice and be glad in it.”

  Aunt Zella smiled approvingly, then placed the tea bag in a tiny china teacup. She was pushing eighty, so it was always eventful to see her carry the kettle from the stove to the table and then get the water into the cups. But Clay knew good and well that he should not, under any circumstances, offer to help.

  Despite a slight miss, water got into both teacups, and Aunt Zella nodded her satisfaction. She joined him at her small kitchen table, where butter was always kept at room temperature, right next to her pillbox.

  Clay let his tea steep. “Good to see you, Aunt Zella.”

  “So tell me all about it.”

  “You tell me all about it.”

  “You bring us any of our canned tamaters?”

  Clay cleared his throat. Us and our were such tiny words, but when she meant herself and her dead husband, they were a little disconcerting.

  Aunt Zella turned to the framed picture on the counter. “He forgot, Lloyd. Again.”

  “It creeps me out when you do that,” Clay said.

  “Then don’t listen.”

  Clay tried not to. The thing was, it wasn’t because she was getting old and senile. She’d been talking to Lloyd for years, ever since he died.

  He looked around the room at all the pictures of Lloyd. Birthday parties. Lloyd in his early twenties in his Army uniform. Lloyd’s obituary. Every anniversary party they ever threw. Draped over their wedding picture on the kitchen counter was a thin leather-string necklace holding a handmade pewter Jerusalem cross.

  Aunt Zella slapped Clay’s hand. “Can’t believe you forgot the tamaters again.”

  “I rented the upstairs, the walk-up.”

  “No, Lloyd wants to chat about tamaters.”

  “To a girl.”

  Suddenly Aunt Zella took a long, gaspy breath. Then she made a choking noise. Her head fell to the table and she went limp.

  Clay lifted her arm, but it dropped back to the table. “Finally. I thought the old bag would never kick off. I wonder where she keeps her valuables.”

  Aunt Zella stood and went to get a bag of cookies from the cupboard.

  “It’s a miracle,” Clay said, sipping his tea.

  “Is she a pretty girl?”

  “Let’s chat about tamaters.”

  Clay watched as she struggled to open the bag. It was everything he could do not to jump up and help her, but he knew how important her independence was. She refused to ask for help.

  “How are they?” he asked, watching her flex her fingers. She stood for a long moment staring out her kitchen window, clutching the bag of cookies, then turned to the table and handed it to him, unopened. Her bottom lip trembled.

  Clay rose, got her cream off the shelf, and pulled her chair out. As she sat down, frustrated, he squeezed a bit into his palm and took her hand, gently rubbing it in. Right in front of him, she slowly relaxed.

  After a while she opened her eyes. They sat quietly, as they did sometimes. She liked to watch the hummingbirds out the window. But today she was watching him.

  “That’s not your destiny, you know,” she said, breaking the quiet.

  “What?” Sometimes Aunt Zella was as coherent as a thirty-year-old. Other times she rambled. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.

  “What happened to your parents,” she added.

  Clay sighed. He didn’t really want to talk about it. “Nothing happened to them. It was their choice.”

  He didn’t think about it much anymore. He was grown now. They all had their separate lives. But at eight, it felt like his whole world had crashed down. And somehow he went from being their son to being their weapon of choice. His mom used him to try to make his dad stop having affairs. His dad used him as an excuse to keep having the affairs. Through it all, he never felt unloved. But he saw what the absence of love could do to a human being, what it could make one human being do to another.

  Still, while he was always loved, he was not always looked after. Once the divorce happened, it seemed to usher in a new era of permissiveness. An era that he had trouble finding his way out of.

  Aunt Zella took his hands into hers. “There isn’t a rule out there that love won’t break. For good and for bad.”

  She had a way of looking right through him, right into his soul.

  “It’s not love. It’s rent.”

  She sipped her tea again. “That’s what they always say.”

  From the outside, the Brewhouse looked small, almost like a cabin in the woods. Inside was an eclectic mixture of young college kids and some older regulars. Two pool tables sat across the room, the only squares among the circles of people. A jukebox played Maroon 5. The tables by the bar were crowded with a rambunctious birthday party crowd.

  Amber, Trish, and Carol sat at a high-top somewhere in the middle, far enough from the music to hear themselves talk, close enough to the bar to hear the tinkling sound of ice on glass. Trish had given her face a double dose of makeup. Her lips, pulpy and red as a stoplight, flashed coy smiles as men passed. Her beautiful doe eyes were lined with black. Amber had made an attempt at it, but she
was never really good at makeup. At least the current styles. She could manage a little lipstick. A wink of mascara.

  “Hey,” she said, nudging Trish. “Sign my cast!”

  Trish grinned as Amber handed her a pen. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Carol?”

  Carol was flagging down a waitress. “I don’t sign anything. Learned a lesson or two about that from my first three marriages.”

  “I’ll sign it.”

  They all three looked up to find an almost-attractive guy standing there, leaning a bit to the left, his gaze somewhere between intense and asleep. He was blinking a lot and smiling at things like the drink menu and the poster on the wall. Then he managed to focus on Amber. “I’ll sign anything you got.” The words fell softly off his tongue as if they were barely making it out of his mouth.

  Carol grabbed the pen out of Trish’s hand and wielded it like a knife. “Back off, Tarzan.”

  The guy stepped away, beat his chest, and then started coughing.

  “Back to your cave,” Carol ordered and the guy finally drifted off. She eyed Trish and Amber. “Let me tell you something, girls. Sure, they’re fun to play with, those types. But you need to test-drive them in the real world. Do you understand what I’m saying? In here, you got bright lights and loud music and plenty of things to make the vision blurry, you hear me? I’m talking from experience. Too much experience.” She regarded the pen in her hand. “Oh, all right. I’ll sign it.”

  “Thank you,” Amber said, sliding her arm across the table.

  Carol started to sign, then tilted her head and narrowed her eyes, reading something on the cast.

  “Sorry,” Amber said. “One of my friends can be a little crass.”

  “That’s not what I’m . . . Does that say Clay Walsh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “‘Old Fashioned’ Clay Walsh? That Clay Walsh?”

  “I just rented the apartment above his . . .” Amber watched as Trish and Carol exchanged smirks. “What?”

  Carol handed back the pen and finished off her beer. “Did he dazzle you with any of his theories yet?”

  She knew any expression she mustered wouldn’t hide the truth, so she didn’t even try to mask it. “Do you know him?”

  Trish shook her head but Carol nodded. “Only actually met him once. He’s a trip. Used to be quite the player.”

  “Player?”

  “Some girls that worked for me years ago dated him in college. They had some . . . stories. Good stories. Never liked those DVDs though.”

  “DV—?”

  Suddenly a Tarzan yell caused them all to turn. The drunk guy was on the dance floor, waving big.

  Amber looked at Trish. “I think that one’s for you.”

  Trish grinned and hopped off the stool, hurrying over.

  Carol was waving too, but not at Tarzan. She had yet to flag down a waitress. Finally she gave up. “You have to be under thirty to get anyone’s attention around here. I’ll be right back. You want anything?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  Clay. A trip, yeah. But a player? Carol apparently didn’t know him like Amber did. She sighed and watched the crowd. And then she noticed it. All the young people were grind dancing on the floor. And all the older ones were at the bar. Alone. Carol stood at the end, crowded out by one filled stool after another, still unable to get anyone’s attention even as she nearly hung herself over the side of the bar. She smiled at a man nearby. He only looked away.

  Was that what Amber could expect in ten years? Sitting at a bar alone, hoping someone might smile at her? Unable to get the bartender’s attention? Fending off drunk guys when the young girls were too naive to know what they were doing?

  Carol returned with two beers. “Just sayin’. You look like you could use a drink.”

  “Thanks,” Amber said but did nothing more than run her fingers up and down the bottle.

  “Something on your mind?”

  “You’ve been married three times?”

  “Four. But got one annulled.”

  “Sometimes I’m afraid of being alone. But sometimes . . . I’m afraid of not.”

  Carol pulled a cigarette and a lighter from her purse, slid them in the front pocket of her shirt. “Listen, honey. After a while, you start to realize they’re all the same.”

  “Who?”

  “Men. They always got one thing on their mind. It’s just that some of them are hiding it better than others. Some of them at least know how to make a good first impression. Jim and Ronny, those two guys—I actually brought them both home to meet my parents. I was love-struck, I’ll tell you that.”

  “What about the third?”

  “I dunno. He rode a motorcycle and everyone called him Cupcake.” She glanced Amber’s way. “I have a thing for sugar and Harleys.”

  “What about the fourth?”

  Carol seemed to fade into the memory and then right back out, with a small smile followed by a tiny frown. “Dimitri.”

  “Dimitri. Jim, Ronny, Cupcake, and Dimitri.”

  “Former Russian ballet dancer.”

  Amber laughed. “No kidding. What’s the story behind him?”

  Carol leaned forward, closer to Amber, her eyes twinkling and soft against a good memory. “Gorgeous, this one. Jet-black hair. Ice-blue eyes. Features chiseled like he’d just stepped out of a black-and-white movie. And his accent. The way he danced. The way he held me.”

  “But that one you annulled?”

  The hard edge that was Carol came back into full focus. “That, kiddo, was one of those things that happen when you decide you should go for the exact opposite of who you are. You know? A challenge. A lost cause. Sees the world totally different than you. It’s all exciting and different and then . . .”

  “Then?”

  “Then you realize you can’t stand the way the other makes coffee. And then that you can’t stand each other.” Carol hopped off the barstool. “All this talk about men and cupcakes, I gotta go get some fresh air, and by fresh, I mean smoky.” She gave a friendly wink and sauntered off.

  Amber wasn’t alone for ten seconds before a guy swooped in to fill the barstool. He introduced himself as Mike. Amber smiled and nodded, but it was Carol’s words that hung inside her ear, washing away every other sound.

  “CLAY, DEARY! Come here!”

  “Hi, Mrs. Bronston.” Clay pushed his shopping cart down the cereal aisle toward her.

  “Did you get yourself a new coupon book?”

  Clay held it up. “It holds them all nice and neat, just like you suggested.”

  She patted his arm with her shaky hand. “Good, good. Did you see the Spam’s two for a dollar today? And with the newspaper coupon, you get ’em for a quarter. A quarter!”

  “Nice.”

  Mrs. Bronston leaned heavily on her cane, her hand still on Clay’s arm. “Clay, honey, you know how I love seeing you every Saturday morning here at the market.”

  “I’m just pretending to grocery shop in hopes of running into you.”

  “But I worry. You’re such a nice young man—”

  “You bring out my charm.”

  “Why don’t you have some young girls following you around everywhere?”

  Clay grinned. “I’m very popular with the ladies. They’re just a little older, a tad under one hundred.”

  “I’ll be ninety-four next Tuesday.”

  “It’s like we were made for each other.”

  “Oh, now,” she said, swatting him. “Why don’t you try some of those moves on a woman who can bear children?”

  “I can be . . . difficult, Mrs. Bronston.”

  “Honey, you don’t know difficult until you know my Louie.”

  “Lou? He seemed as gentle as flesh-eating bacteria.”

  She smiled knowingly. “Still miss him. Can’t believe he’s been gone for five years now.”

  “What was your secret?”

  “To what?”

  “Staying married.”


  Mrs. Bronston shrugged. “I guess in our day and age, nobody thought there was an option to do otherwise.” She put her cane in her cart. “Now I better get going before Jerry sells out of pork chops back there.” Then she pointed to Clay’s head. “Sweetheart, if you’d just brush your hair a little bit, part it all nice and neat, you might get a few looks your way.”

  Clay smiled. “I’ll think about it. Have a good day.”

  He stood there for a moment, wondering about his hair and whether he should have more fiber in his diet. He was about to reach for a cereal that looked as exciting as algebra when something bumped his cart, which then bumped him.

  “Hey there, stress boy.”

  Her!

  “Hey there, pretty girl.” Clay blinked. Did he say that out loud? He cast a startled gaze toward her. Yes, he did, because she was grinning like a girl who was just called pretty. And she was.

  “Did you just flirt with me?”

  “No.” Yes. But not on purpose.

  “You did.”

  “Spam’s on sale two for a buck.”

  “I liked your other pickup line better.” Amber eyed his cart. “Are those coupons?”

  His heart was pounding now, the way it did when he wanted something he couldn’t—shouldn’t—have. She was like the middle shelf of the cereal aisle . . . sweet, fun, colorful, and so bad for his health. He clawed his face, then turned his cart around, afraid of what was going to come out next.

  But down the pasta and bean aisle, there she was, right by his side, making it impossible for other customers to pass. She didn’t even notice. What she was noticing was their baskets. She pointed to his.

  “That’s quite a system you have going there.”

  Clay looked down. Everything was nicely divided. His frozen goods, his meat, his fruits and vegetables, soap and shampoo. In hers, everything was piled up. The meat and Kleenex were touching. And everything was name brands.

  “I see you like a bargain,” she said.

  He grabbed some lima beans. “I guess so.”

  They continued on, her cart next to his.

  “Our first date,” she said.

  “This isn’t a date.” He looked sideways at her.

  “You’re so romantic. How’d you find this place?”